Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.

I have an American top hat that's collapsible and works as a frisbee.

Better to put things at the worst at first and reserve the best for a surprise.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.

Secular music was not allowed in our household.

I would not trade the difficult years for all the prosperity in the world. God knows what each one of us must suffer in order to be conformed to the image of Christ.

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel? We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.

You don't bring glory or pleasure to God by hiding your abilities or by trying to be someone else. You only bring him enjoyment by being you.

In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeoning of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.